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Graduated a couple of years back, from a local school in Bangalore, and I have a bittersweet experience regarding this. I happened to speak to my prof recently and when asked how things were going, she shrugged and replied, "Its the usual. Most of them are waiting for TCS/Infosys to conduct college placements and they're just trying to get through their final sem". Unfortunately, "Get through" is usually just an euphemism for what was reported in the article. >> Most classes (and exams) I completely ignored. I can relate to this. I was in a CS degree and I was busy making basic websites, doing an internship at a local startup, playing for the college football team and trying out dramatics. I realized I wasn't going to get much out of class anyway and I'd be better off having fun while trying out a bunch of things. But all this changed when it came down to the final sem when I was actually required to do something on my own. I pulled a friend along with me and we hacked together a basic AI search engine for the same startup, using Ruby, Rails and Princeton's WordNet database. The code by itself wasn't the most palatable, but it worked. But, here's the real kicker. While, the overwhelming majority of my peers, cherrypicked a project from a catalogue and bought it from an "institute", some of them even managed to score more than me. I personally don't attach much emphasis to grades, but the worrying part is, not only does our system tolerate the plague, going by the grades, it vindicates it. So, how do we remedy this system? I certainly don't have a blueprint but I do feel, there is a desperate paucity of examples. We need more startups, entrpreneurs, hackers, scientists and we need them to do really well nationally/internationally. Currently, whatever little we have of the above mentioned, a lot of them, in my experience happened in spite of our education system. PS: I mentioned to my prof about CS project opportunities at the startup I work. I hope a few students do turn up. |